21–30 of 33 posts
I agree its bad and it should be fixed but... I think AI is going to greatly decrease the quality of the internet in the coming years. What we have now, as bad as it is, will be remembered as being very good in 2035. AI will clog this place up. Eventually there will be a serious attempt to make an internet where each user is a verified human person, to sieve out the AI slop, but I don't think that will succeed and an…
You can't fix it, because it's a problem of incentives. * Businesses want to maximize shareholder value * Those running websites want to do as much SEO-slop as possible to appear first * Content creators need to maximize views, which means rage-bait, clickbait, etc. * Addictive content = more time spent, more ads seen You can't 'fix' the internet. The internet, like many things, is a tool. Shareholders and individual…
I suppose people could try to make a non-monitizable internet. Everything would have to be self-hosted. No ads would be allowed anywhere. No business would be allowed to build anything, just users. Some kind of super-admin would have to have to power to perma-ban any website or user that breaks the rules. But you'd still have the problem of people who aren't directly monitizing things, like influencers. You'd have bo…
But trying to make a 'non-monetizable' internet is an oxymoron. If it has the ability to allow people to communicate, then it can be used to sell things.
You can't have an exchange of information without that information potentially containing garbage designed to make someone else money. You can only eliminate spam calls if you decide to get rid of the invention of the telephone.
Almost all the traffic on the internet goes to one of like, five companies. They're the ones psychologically experimenting on your kids and intentionally making their services addictive and mental illness-inducing. The other 99% of the internet is still mostly fine. If you simply blocked access to the top 1% most visited websites, I suspect that would solve most of the issues people see with "the internet".
Build wholesome small-scale services just for you and the people you care about. I run a little private photo-sharing/messaging service for me and my friends, along with other nice things like a Jellyfin server for media. There's just no incentive to introduce anything bad like you inevitably get with massive for-profit companies. And, these corners of the web are never realistically going to be subject to all the recent regulation like the Online Safety Act, if it's just a small invite-only space.
We shouldn't have tens of millions of people on one platform arguing over what sort of content should and shouldn't be allowed, ruled by big tech oligarchs. Build an area of your own that you can share with your friends!
Unfortunately I think the mobile app store model significantly increases the barriers to random people making their own things. You can teach a young teenager to make a little website that they can stick on GitHub Pages and show off to their friends in an afternoon. A mobile app? Not so much. Especially if it requires possibly buying a Mac to run XCode, and then an Apple Developer account (maybe not that expensive if you're in the tech industry, but if you're a kid who just wants to try it out and show stuff to your friends, it's a pretty big barrier + there's the id verification stuff). It's unsurprising that such a small amount of the software for iOS is free/open-source, compared to platforms where the costs to develop are lower.
Probably stop using platforms/sites that exist to make money off you. I know it sounds ridiculous, but... the vast majority of the crappiness on the web is due to greed for money. If platforms didn't care about making money through ad revenue they woudln't be manipulative attention-harvesting outrage-bait. You can actually engage in the trash platforms by using unofficial methods - I browse "youtube" by searching on…
The internet is dead as we knew it, long live the internet.
I don’t think it can be fixed. When the internet was used only by people who were geeky enough to find chatting on IRC exciting and set up websites and blogs simply for the fun of it, there was a thrill in doing all this stuff for the first time and you had to organise IRL meet-ups just to find like-minded people. Once everything became about clicks and ad impressions and content was created to make money, not just b…
It seems the prevailing pattern is that removing barriers to entry means things get worse. In 2025 there are no barriers left and everyone is online all the time. It’s the end stage of the internet we loved.
In fact the barriers have been destroyed so utterly that we are awash in AI generated content now. The dead internet theory is real. Why are we still here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose people could try to make a non-monitizable internet. Everything would have to be self-hosted. No ads would be allowed anywhere. No business would be allowed to build anything, just users. Some kind of super-admin would have to have to power to perma-ban any website or user that breaks the rules. But you'd still have the problem of people who aren't directly monitizing things, like influencers. You'd have bo…
Bots and influencers are minimal concerns if there's no money to be had - since that's ultimately the driving force between those. But trying to make a 'non-monetizable' internet is an oxymoron. If it has the ability to allow people to communicate, then it can be used to sell things. You can't have an exchange of information without that information potentially containing garbage designed to make someone else money.…
Still, with intense moderation it is sometimes possible. Wikipedia has a vast amount of information passing through it and has stayed pretty free of monitization - although, certainly some companies have written themselves some pretty positive wiki-pages - in general I would say it is a success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bots and influencers are minimal concerns if there's no money to be had - since that's ultimately the driving force between those. But trying to make a 'non-monetizable' internet is an oxymoron. If it has the ability to allow people to communicate, then it can be used to sell things. You can't have an exchange of information without that information potentially containing garbage designed to make someone else money.…
Heh. True. The saga of r/art this last few weeks is a good lession in how trying to demonitize things can be difficult. Still, with intense moderation it is sometimes possible. Wikipedia has a vast amount of information passing through it and has stayed pretty free of monitization - although, certainly some companies have written themselves some pretty positive wiki-pages - in general I would say it is a success.
This is the same problem law has, even at the global scale.
You can't moderate when almost every single person in the chain is a bad actor. Individuals will chip away at any structure or organization day by day, year by year, until they are eventually rewarded.
Probably stop using platforms/sites that exist to make money off you. I know it sounds ridiculous, but... the vast majority of the crappiness on the web is due to greed for money. If platforms didn't care about making money through ad revenue they woudln't be manipulative attention-harvesting outrage-bait. You can actually engage in the trash platforms by using unofficial methods - I browse "youtube" by searching on…
You'll really be surprised how quickly YAGNI kicks in for like 99% of the internet.